


Three

by Nai



Category: Hazards of Love (Album)
Genre: Dark, Gen, Ghosts, Murder, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 21:04:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nai/pseuds/Nai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A father kills his three children after the death of wife, desperately longing to return to a life as a bachelor. They come back to visit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Southern_Heaven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Southern_Heaven/gifts).



**Three.**

There were three ghosts in the room with Margaret and the Rake. The first puffed air through its crooked little front teeth. The second wheezed slowly, and the third not at all. All of them together made music with this breathing, patiently waiting for their father to fall.

**One.**

Once upon a time, there was a marriage. That was how it started.

Or not a _marriage_, exactly. It started with the Rake's father fucking the Rake's mother in the back of some old, rotten barn with the hay tangling in her hair and catching under his fingernails, the sour smell of animal clouding over everything. It was not a good beginning.

For a number of reasons – the least of which being that it _hadn't_ begun in marriage – that was the last she saw of him, and so when she became pregnant from the encounter, it seemed appropriate, her luck being what it was. Eight months later came the Rake, born early and therefore almost inhumanly small, with a name that was _not_ the Rake but ultimately suited him as well as a pair of suspenders suited a mountain lion. By age five, he was stealing girls' picnic lunches and spitting into them, into their lovely daisy cakes and pickled plumbs and sandwiches all wrapped with their parents' steadfast love, and by fifteen, he took these same girls behind the schoolhouse and made love to them, or, rather made what could best be described as love in the Rake's eyes, which really wasn't much like love at all.

He married. It was in the late summer, and bugs hung lazily in the air, grouping in little clouds around the steps of the chapel as the bells resonated throughout the town. The bride moved her hands nervously — she moved everything nervously, in fact — so swallowed up she was in the whole experience, this promising herself to one person for the rest of her life. The Rake hadn't developed the best reputation with women — the girls he met once never chanced to spend time with him again, as he was rough and selfish in bed and rude and vulgar outside of it — but she didn't know that yet. Their family had entered into arrangement before the two future lovers even laid eyes on each other, fastening their social status with rivets of silver and gold as, although unfortunate in luck and love, the Rake's mother had quite the inheritance.

The bride worried about whether or not his family was settling for her, if she was ready to devote herself to one human being, if she could truly be a wife. The Rake saw this as a glorious opportunity, saw _her_ as a glorious opportunity. A warm body that shouldn't resist, that would tie legs around his back during his pursuits, that would plant kisses on his neck, his ear, his lips, that would give everything to him and then call him, _call him_ to take more.

And then came the children.

He couldn't think of the first time he thought of killing them. Surely not the day Isaiah was born, the day he stared down at the creature that would be thence forth be known as his _son_ and saw an old man in those wide baby eyes, in those fragile fingers. Surely not the day Charlotte was born either, although he left his wife with the midwife and went to vomit outside after the _event_ (or so he called it), kicking up dirt to mask the smell, wiping his mouth with the leaves from the bushes. Surely, _surely_ not the day Dawn was born, for by then he was almost numb to it, and he remembered touching her newborn skin with the detached feeling he was touching a rock, an empty bag, something _inanimate_ that wasn't going to steal away his nights with its cries and his day with its pathetic whining. What had really frightened him, though, were the years ahead of him that he could see disappearing into the horizon, his life, meaningless, dwarfed by their own budding sentience.

When his fourth child was born, his wife died along with her, and that was all right.

**Two.**

Twice upon a time, years in the future, there was a haunting.

In this twisted, whirling present, in this room with all of the ghosts, his wife wasn't there. It was impossible to say where her spirit _was_—whether it rested in heaven or hell or nothingness— because the dead never talked about where they came to rest. But the children, oh the children, how they talked, or rather _breathed_ in that room, filling it with an unearthly, organic hum.

"Father," one echoed finally.

Their voices tied together. Their lips moved together. The three of them had become one unit, almost, save for their staggered breathing, like sloppy fingers on a harpsichord, a jolting push and pull, and the walls breathed with them.

He hated when they called him that.

**Three.**

The third and final one he killed was Isaiah.

The first was Charlotte.

Charlotte was five years old and trusted her father with a naivety that sickened the Rake, despite its inherent advantages. She listened to him. She was the only one to never misbehave, the only one to stay put when he told her to, the only one who wouldn't question the foxglove he chopped up with the steel kitchen knife and offered her for a mid-afternoon snack while Isaiah was out playing and Dawn lay sleeping in her crib. She looked up at him, prodding the edge of a flower with her tiny, child-sized fork, and asked him what it was, and he said:

"Something special."

"Something you'll learn about later," he said.

"Give it a try," he said.

"All right?" he said.

She was very well-behaved.

The next was Dawn, two years old and, with her size, by far the easiest to take care of. He had left Charlotte in her bedroom to deal with the poison while he went to wake Dawn from her nap, lifting her up out of her crib as she blinked up at him, her mind still too foggy with sleep to understand what was happening. He took her to the bathroom, turned on the bath water as high as it would go, and very calmly, very peacefully placed her down in the basin, knowing that her arms were too small and too weak to pull herself out of the deep tub. He went to leave her alone. When she began to protest, telling him, _no, turn the water down, that's too much, that's too much_ with tears pouring down her face, he looked at her and he told her, meeting her eyes:

"I'll be back soon."

"I'll come for you," he said.

"Don't cry," he said.

"All right?" he said.

And then there was Isaiah. The plan, of course, was to feed him the foxglove as well, but Isaiah was older than the others, and he knew when to question, he knew when the house was too quiet, and he knew when his father was lying. When the Rake offered him a plate, Isaiah asked what it was, and when he told him it was something "special" (you'll learn about it later, give it a try, all right?), Isaiah told him, with all the eloquence of an eight-year-old, to shove it.

The Rake didn't remember much of what happened next. He remembered losing his cool. He remembered raising his voice and the way it scratched the back of his throat, and how his cheeks were warm and so was his hand when he grabbed his son's arm, and then he remembered how his nose gushed blood, his upper lip sticky with it, after Isaiah slammed his head into his face.

And then there was white noise, a kitchen knife, and an overwhelming surge of satisfaction. The fire he remembered more clearly, because while the smell was more foul than he ever imagined, it was his first shining, glorious evening as a free man. He warmed his hands with the flames, and he was not sorry.

**Four.**

Four years was all it took for them to find him again.

**Three.**

Three was the important number.

He had Margaret for three days. It was three in the morning when he came back from drinking to the sounds of gasping in his ears.

There were three ghosts in the room with Margaret and the Rake.

He knew he was not losing his mind. He knew this because Margaret, too, could see and hear them, although she said nothing and only watched with her wide, brown eyes, her one free hand picking at the clasp binding the other. She was his beautiful captive bird, and she was also the third woman he brought to his house against her will.

The whip he had bought for Margaret.

The whip was shifting, now, sliding back and forth, trembling, even, like a leaf in the wind, but it didn't move from its place atop the fireplace. He went to grab it, his whole mind humming with fear and anger and determination, but something caught on his ankle and he was flung forward instead, slamming headfirst into the wall, and then into hardwood floor. His nose was bleeding. It felt very familiar.

"Father," they said again.

The Rake wasn't sure if the sound he heard was Margaret crying or the crackling sounds of his children's dead joints and tissues, the whistling of air through their chapped lips, the walls in the house giving way around them. The atmosphere in the room was so crowded that every inhale made the Rake feel like he was breathing gelatin, and he was reminded, _father, I'm not feeling well…_

And he choked on it, this rotten, suffocating air, and he was reminded, _father, turn the water down…_

There was an incredible weight on his back. When he went to move himself up off the ground, the force shoved him down again, and two pairs of gnarled, small hands held onto the back of his head to keep him from moving his neck. From his place on the ground, he could see the whip was no longer above the fireplace.

"Spare the rod, you'll spoil the child," said the voice in his ear, a tickling whisper, "but I prefer the lash."

But he knew where it was.

**Zero.**

In the minute before he died, the Rake couldn't tell the difference between the sounds and the pain. He couldn't divorce the hiss of the whip from the agony shooting up through his spinal cord to his toes, his fingertips, his eyeballs, his gums. He couldn't tell the difference between the words the ghosts whispered and the way the world fell out from under his body with every strangled breath.

In the minute before he died, the Rake didn't feel sorry for murdering each and every one of his children, but he could no longer feel proud of it either, because he could no longer make that distinction. He was nothing. He was a rock. An empty bag. Something inanimate.

And for the children, that was all right.


End file.
